The Design Museum is the world’s leading museum devoted to architecture and design. Its work encompasses all elements of design, including fashion, product and graphic design. Since it opened its doors in 1989 the museum has displayed everything from an AK-47 to high heels designed by Christian Louboutin. It has staged over 100 exhibitions, welcomed over five million visitors and showcased the work of some of the world’s most celebrated designers and architects.

On 24 November 2016, The Design Museum relocated to Kensington, West London. Leading architectural designer John Pawson has converted the interior of a 1960s modernist building to create a new home for the Design Museum giving it three times more space in which to show a wider range of exhibitions and significantly extend its learning programme.

The museum is currently hosting two exhibitions, one about sculptor-turned-couturier Azzedine Alaïa, and the one I came to see, Hope to Nope.

Hope to Nope

The rise of graphic design

The idea is that the ten years since the global financial crash of 2008 have been especially politically volatile. At the same time, the rise of social media has changed the way graphic political messages are made and disseminated. Traditional media have been joined by social media, with its hashtags and memes – all of which means that the influence and impact of graphic design have never been greater.

This exhibition explores the numerous ways graphic messages have challenged, altered and influenced key political moments.

Have they, though? ‘Challenged, altered and influenced key political moments’?

Or are they just creative images, slogans and memes – millions of them, easy to make for anyone with a smart phone and a bit of flair – which are as enjoyable as TV ads or pop songs, but change nothing? I went along to find out.

Big and varied

This big exhibition cherry picks from many of the political protest movements of the past ten years all sorts of ephemera – placards, banners, posters, t-shirts, installations and art works – alongside film footage of political rallies, and a section devoted to the rise of social media.

Politically neutral

The curators are careful to say that the exhibition takes no particular political line and doesn’t necessarily support any of these causes, but I didn’t really accept that. One of the two ‘media partners’ is the Guardian newspaper and the exhibition is really a sort of three-dimensional Guardian. Among many others issues and events, it features:

a display case about the anti-capitalist Occupy movement

a wall-sized photo of the women’s marches in Washington, London and elsewhere

a big quilt, a protest video and other artefacts from the Black Lives Matter movement

opposition to Vladimir Putin, especially to his anti-gay policies

opposition to Tory Austerity and Brexit in Britain

opposition to Jacob Zuma’s corrupt regime in South Africa

opposition to the North Korean dictatorship of Kim Jong-un

opposition to the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

You get the picture. Lots of opposition movements.

Oh, and Donald Trump. Did I mention Donald Trump? It very very powerfully comes across that a lot of American artists, feminists, academics, writers and activists don’t like Donald Trump one little bit.

Banner from International Women’s Day. Photo by Steve Rapport

In other words, no surprises – all the usual movements are here and all the usual hate figures from the front pages of the Guardian and other bien-pensant publications.

Structure of the show

The exhibition is rather loosely divided into three parts: Power, Protest and Personality.

1. Personality

This is the clearest (and smallest) section – highlighting the way politics around the world has come to be dominated by strong personalities who provoke strong and divisive reactions – Trump, Putin, Erdogan and so on.

In this section we find Theresa May being pilloried in a set of very funny cartoons by Chris Riddell (of the Guardian). Jeremy Corbyn has a section to himself, which features a suite of satirical front covers from Private Eye, the glossy cover shoot he did for GQ magazine, samples from the Corbyn comic books which (apparently) proliferated when he was elected leader, and a striking Corbyn t-shirt – plain white with the Nike swoosh on it and the word Corbyn where ‘Nike’ should be. (Apparently, the designer and manufacturer had an injunction taken out against them and had to scrap the design, making this a valuable rarity.)

Corbyn t-shirt with Nike swoosh. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

But the award for the Political Personality Who Dominates Our Age and Who You Love To Hate goes to… Go on, guess. Well, he owns a tower and is called Donald.

There’s a wall-sized display of more than 50 news magazines (including The Economist, TIME and Der Spiegel) chosen because they all feature cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, spoof and doctored portraits of The Donald, from the moment he was selected as the Republican candidate to when he became President.

What does this prove, exactly? Mainly that there has been no let-up in the scathing satire and criticism Trump has been subjected to by the left-liberal press since he first entered the presidential race. And with what result? Did satirical cartoons and scathing articles prevent him becoming Republican candidate, or prevent him being elected president? Have they gotten him impeached and kicked out?

Nope. Fail. As about a million other commentators have pointed out, all this ridicule by the East Coast – or foreign, intellectual – élite only confirms the belief of his grass-roots supporters that Donald is their man, an outsider, someone who will stand up for their values, values they see being ridiculed on a daily basis across almost all the mainstream media. ‘We’ may hate him but ‘they’ just carry on loving him to bits.

2. Protest

The section on Protest is dominated by a wall-sized screen onto which are projected a few minutes of news footage from each of five countries showing protesters in action – marching, chanting, fighting with the police.

Hope to Nope film installation by Paul Plowman. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

This turns out to be an installation by Paul Plowman. In front of the big screen is a set of smaller screens on stands showing alternative images of protests, interspersed with the hashtags which were used in each of the different protests featured. The countries and events being:

Nearby are posters mocking Vladimir Putin, a suite of posters from North Korea exemplifying the state-sponsored poster art of that country, some photographs showing a protester in China, a panel about the ‘Umbrella protests’ in Hong Kong in 2014, some examples of wall art and graffiti made by Iranian artists to protest what they see as the corrupt nature of the Iranian government.

One of the most striking things in the show is a two-metre-high replica of the inflatable duck from the 2016 protests held against Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

And there’s material from the 2015 Je Suis Charlie movement and the ‘Peace for Paris’ marches.

But I kept being drawn back to the enormous Plowman video installation, not least because it is very loud, with sounds of people chanting and yelling, the roar of police sirens etc.

I also liked the way the hashtags zoomed past on the smaller screens of the installation, hundreds of them. Maybe their sheer number is meant to shock and awe the viewer into realising how Mighty the opposition is, how many of ‘us’ there are, how global ‘the movement’ is.

But to me it powerfully conveyed the opposite, the sheer ephemerality of many of these movements, each with their fleeting moments on TV, and a few days trending on twitter, before being forgotten.

And when you see a load of hashtags all together, following in quick succession, you can’t help noticing how facile they are.

Anti-capitalism

Also in the Protest section we learn that capitalism is a bad thing. We know this because of all the people who’ve used their Macs and Ipads (designed in America, built in China, delivered to your door by Amazon) to design graphics, cartoons and memes slagging off evil international corporations.

And also because of all the anti-capitalist protesters who use multinational corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to protest, organise and lobby against the way the world is run by multinational corporations.

The most notable example was the 2011 Occupy movement, active here in London, in New York and elsewhere. Display cases show their numerous anti-capitalist leaflets, booklets, posters and slogans, t-shirts and badges. And did they overthrow capitalism? Even a teeny tiny bit?

Display case of Occupy items. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

We also learn that some of these massive corporations tell fibs – videlicet a vast poster reminding us of the way Volkswagen comprehensively lied about the diesel output of its cars.

It’s next to art work criticising BP, which will be forever associated – by the kind of protesters this exhibition celebrates – with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

the art work is a sort of neck frill, not unlike the ones Elizabethan courtiers used to wear, made of green crepe paper designed to look like the BP logo. From the accompanying photo the idea is that you paint your face BP green, slip on the crepe BP logo, and go join a crowd protesting against wicked oil companies. Maybe you drive there, or organise a coach…

Protest web statistics

I work in website analytics. Until recently I worked as a Digital Insights Manager for a British government agency. This experience has taught me that you really can prove anything with statistics. Another way of putting that is how remarkably easy it is to bamboozle people who don’t use figures very often or aren’t at home with figures.

As a result I don’t really believe any statistics about anything I hear from anyone, not just governments, anyone.

This is relevant because the exhibition features a timeline dating the advent and rise of various social media platforms over the past ten years (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, all the usual suspects). They are the big red, blue and green circles you can see in the photo below.

Beneath these – under each of the black, red and blue smart phone icons – is an array of Fascinating Facts and Stunning Stats designed – I think – to show you just how Important and Relevant and Urgent contemporary protest is. Certainly how social media helps spread its messages at lightning speed to huge numbers of people.

Timeline of social media and protest statistics. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

Thus we are told that:

in 2011 450,000 accounts sent 1.8 million tweets containing #OccupyWallStreet

in 2012, in the week before he quit, tweets calling for the resignation of Egyptian president rose from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day

in 2013 #OccupyGezi relating to the Taksim Square protest in Turkey was mentioned 160,000 times on Twitter

in 2013 #BlackLivesMatter jumped from 10,000 to 93,000 tweets after the Ferguson verdict not to charge a white police officer who shot dead a black teenager in the U.S.

in 2016 1 billion tweets were sent relating to the U.S. presidential election

in 2017 11.5 million tweets were sent containing #WomensMarch during global reaction to President Trump’s inauguration

For a start none of these figures are put in any kind of context. Yes 11.5 million is a big number, but a basic fact of the internet and social media is that it is awash with big numbers. What other topics were trending that day or week or year, to help us put these numbers in context? How did it compare with that day’s stats about Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé?

Numbers alone don’t mean anything. Numbers only mean something in a context and it’s humans who create that context.

32.

Is that how old I am or the temperature outside, the number of teams that started the Word Cup in Russia or the number of refugees who drowned in a boat off Libya?

At work, I create the context which makes the figures I present about my web service look really impressive, even though I know that putting them in a different context, with a different narrative, would show them up to be very poor.

Not forgetting that there are quite a few ways to give my numbers a context which would just be confusing, or would make them disappear by making them look like lots of other numbers, and so make any pattern at all difficult or impossible to discern. I could make them do whatever my boss wanted them to do.

Statistics are always created, and for a purpose.

Same here, in this exhibition. The curators have selected a handful of statistics to show how quick and massive social media responses were to key moments of ‘protest’. No doubt they were.

But what that means – how you should interpret the numbers, how they stack up next to other events on the same day, or to similar events happening at the same period or to the tweets and Facebook likes from the opposing point of view…. that context, those other points of view, a fuller picture… are not here.

Results

Oh and as one of my bosses said when I showed him a particularly dramatic graph I had concocted – ‘Fancy figures don’t pay our wages. What about results?’ Practical results which people outside your social media bubble might notice.

Did those 1.8 million tweets bring about the downfall of capitalism? Did #OccupyGezi topple Erdogan? Did those 1 billion tweets sent during the U.S. presidential election stop Trump becoming President?

10 out of 10 for impressive stats. 0 out of 10 for impact.

Global interconnectedness gives a misleading impression of the scale of political protest

I’m dwelling on the issue of numbers because democracy is a numbers game. To win power you have to build coalitions, often with people you don’t really like or share values with.

My view on the current situation is that the internet and social media have certainly made everything more global (and this exhibition is a good example), but that this is not necessarily the blessing it appears.

It now means that women protesting against rape in India can hook up with Reclaim the Night campaigners in America, or that anti-capitalist protesters all across Europe and the States can link up and co-ordinate their protests and publications. Fine.

All this activity (not to mention the relentless support of papers like the Guardian and the New York Times and their liberal avatars around the world, and artworks and installations and exhibitions like this one) gives the impression that it’s all coming together, that we have the numbers, that truth and justice are on our side so we must win, that we’re soooooo close to the tipping point, one more march, one more protest, and we will get our way and…

Capitalism will be toppled. The patriarchy will be overthrown. Trump will be impeached. Catalonia will win its independence. Turkey will become a liberal democracy. Putin will resign and name a gay video artist as his successor.

But I wonder whether it’s the very internationalism of the movement which condemns it to failure – because, although sizeable communities of protesters, objectors and activists can now hook up across regions, countries and continents, reassuring and encouraging each other – within their own individual countries they remain definitely in the minority. Within their own individual countries there simply aren’t enough of them to make the changes they want to see.

After all, despite the deluge of opposition across social media, mainstream media, despite all the street protests, t-shirts and badges, and all the TV comedians relentlessly mocking the other side – Trump won the US election, Brexit won the referendum, Putin was re-elected, Erdogan has just won re-election, Viktor Orbán has just won re-election, The Five Star Movement are in power in Italy, and so on…

I had thought this was the message of the so-called Arab Spring. Bien-pensant liberals in the West thought ‘Hooray, Libya is going to turn into Switzerland, Syria is going to turn into Sweden, the whole Middle East is going to be transformed into socially progressive democracies’.

All the revolutionaries in Egypt, Syria, Libya and so on were excited by the online networks they were able to create among themselves, and the support they could give via the internet to fellow revolutionaries in the other countries, and the support they got from all well-meaning folk in the West.

All of which DELUDED them into thinking they were in a majority in their own country. But it was social media smoke and mirrors. The majority of the populations of Syria, Egypt, Libya and so on are NOT video artists and LGBTQ+ activists; they are illiterate peasants and vast numbers of under-employed urban youths who don’t have Facebook accounts, don’t particularly want political change or, if there is change, want to see strong nationalist leaders emerge who will give them jobs, keep their country together, and defend their cultural values.

It’s odd that the one of the biggest artefacts here more or less acknowledges this obvious fact. It reads:

To paraphrase: no amount of fancy design, diligent video journalism, snappy hashtags, witty placards and spirited street fighting will overthrow a regime. Only securing the support of (admittedly not necessarily the majority) but still a sizeable minority of the population, will lead to real and cultural political change.

Riots which escalate into the seizure of the presidential palace and the TV stations are often little more than coup d’etats which, as we have seen hundreds of times in the developing world over the past fifty years, generally end up with military dictatorships worse than the one you were trying to overthrow (as in Egypt), or with anarchy (as in Libya) or with prolonged civil war (as in Syria).

The net result of all these attempts to overthrow the wicked dictator is not a wonderful rainbow nation where everyone respects each other’s gender choices, but hundreds of thousands of people fleeing for their lives and drowning in the Mediterranean.

The role of graphics in political protest

Which brings us to the role of graphics in all this political protest. The curators assert at various points that the political activism of the past ten years has seen a particular upsurge in the use of graphics in political protest.

The exhibition aims to capture, depict, examine and display the political graphic design of a turbulent decade.

Alongside traditional posters and banners, the exhibition charts the rise of digital media and social networking, which have given graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach.

Graphic design in the form of internet memes, posters and protest placards is being used by the marginalised and powerful alike to shape political messages like never before.

This is a fascinating, entertaining and often unintentionally funny exhibition but I couldn’t decide whether its central claim was true or not.

On the anti side, the huge photos of the various Women’s Marches and the footage of protest rallies in Barcelona, South Africa, Turkey and so on seemed to feature people holding exactly the kind of home-made banners and placards which I can remember protesters holding from any time in the last 40 years.

I couldn’t see any evidence of a ‘graphics revolution’ in a hand-made placard reading ‘This Pussy Grabs Back’.

Wall-sized installation celebrating the Women’s March in Washington DC

On the other hand, it stands to reason that hundreds of millions of people (generally, we can guess, university-educated, middle-class people) now have access to personal computers which contain an unprecedented array of programs for writing, designing, colouring, typefacing, laying out, and printing all sorts of images, placards, posters, magazines, handouts and so on.

So without a doubt there is more protest material being created, and without a doubt more of it can be distributed over social media than ever before for the self-evident reason that social media didn’t really exist ten years ago. So I suppose it must be true that the internet/social media have given ‘graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach’.

But has it changed the look and impact of graphic elements in political protest?

This might be an impossible question to really answer. The world is a big place, so much is going on, and so many people are creating, publishing, printing and manufacturing so much stuff all the time that it would be pretty challenging to decide if much of it is new.

We made t-shirts and fanzines in the punk era of my youth, back in the 1970s. The Greenham Common women and any number of protesters against Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher managed to make badges, t-shirts, posters and placards and banners and to print off magazines and broadsheets back in the 1980s, without any help from computers or the internet.

Occupy Wall Street t-shirt. Photo by Jason Lester

The speed and spread of visual content online is new, because the whole online infrastructure is relatively new and has expanded at a phenomenal rate. But the nature of that content, and in particular its graphic elements – snappy slogans, faces of hate figures humorously defaced, stirring images of suffering women or children, badges with a little slogan on them — is the graphic content of much of this protest material really new?

A morality tale

Two relatively small display cases placed at opposite ends of the exhibition were, I think, intimately linked and also, I think, tell a neat morality tale.

On the first wall by the entrance door there’s an interesting little display telling us that Hillary Clinton’s team brought in design consultant Michael Bierut from design agency Pentagram to develop a core campaign logo. His proposal was for a logo based round the first letter of her name – H – which would be infinitely ‘refreshable’, and easy for campaign team designers and supporters alike to reversion and use.

Fascinatingly, we get to see the notebook in which he jotted down his early ideas. You can’t help wondering how much he was paid for this great stroke of ‘genius’.

Notebook of Michael Bierut showing his notes on the idea of ‘H’. Photo by the author

Fittingly enough, right at the other end of the exhibition space we come across another display case showing this work of art.

Donald Trump campaign Make America Great Again baseball cap. Photo by the author

Recognise it? Yes, because it is very recognisable. It is in fact, possibly, of all the 300 or so objects on display here, the most successful and recognisable design icon in the exhibition – the red workers’ baseball cap which Donald Trump wore throughout most of his campaign.

And you know the most interesting thing about it? The curators don’t know who designed it. Almost all the other 300 objects, artefacts, t-shirts, badges, cartoons, pamphlets, videos, infographics and so on are carefully attributed to named designers or organisations.

Not the Trump cap. Nobody knows who came up with it. It’s a standard factory-produced cap, and (as the curators point out) even the Times Roman font used for the slogan text is as bog standard, traditional and reassuring as it gets.

The everyday look of the cap struck a chord with Trump supporters from early in his campaign, helping to position him as an everyday guy, an ordinary Joe, a working class guy made good.

Unlike the social media stats which I read and forgot straightaway, possibly the most fascinating fact in the whole exhibition is that between June 2015 and October 2016 the Trump campaign spent more on producing and distributing these caps than on polling.

The moral of this little story would appear to be that expensive, fancy, East Coast design fails, whereas anonymous, everyday, easy-to-make, easy-to-recognise, easy-to-understand artefact and logo, succeeds.

Underlining my belief that, to win power in a democracy, you have to reach out to the greatest number of the electorate, with the widest possible appeal – not just to people who went to college like you, think like you, and have a refined taste in sophisticated graphics like you.

Curators

Hope to Nope is co-curated by the Design Museum and GraphicDesign&’s Lucienne Roberts and David Shaw, with Rebecca Wright. It is really imaginatively laid out, very interesting throughout, with very informative wall labels, some genuinely hilarious pictures, objects and installations, as well as some fascinating new infographics commissioned specially for the show.

It is an excellent, informative and thought-provoking exhibition. But it won’t change anything.

A video

Watch co-curator Lucienne Roberts being interviewed about the exhibition.

Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky. This sense of being abandoned, which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began, however, by sapping them to the point of futility. (p.63)

The plot

We’re in Oran, coastal port and second city of the French colony of Algeria, in Camus’s day (1940-something, according to the first sentence) which at the time had a population of around 200,000.

Rats start dying and then people, too. After some weeks of denial the authorities acknowledge that there is a major outbreak of plague and close the city so that no one can get in or out. The narrative focuses on Dr Bernard Rieux as he tries to treat the first few victims, and comes into contact with a cross-section of characters from the city. The plague just gets worse and worse with Rieux reporting every step of its development and helping the authorities to cope – setting up isolation wards, establishing quarantine for all diagnosed patients, organising Volunteer Squads to go out checking each district of the city.

The book can be analysed out into three strands:

The narrator’s factual, third-person overview of the progress of the plague and its impact on the population’s morale.

The narrator’s interpretation of the events in terms of its impact on individual psychologies and community morale – an interpretation which invokes contemporary ideas derived from Catholic Christianity, revolutionary communism, and liberal humanism.

And the character development of the half dozen or so major characters who we follow all the way through the plague, who represent different types of humanity with different coping strategies. All of these come into contact with Dr Rieux, acquaintances who he treats or friends who he listens to pouring out their souls, their stories, their hopes and fears. Like planets round the sun.

I found the first hundred and fifty pages of The Plague a struggle to read because of the lack of detail about the disease, the lack of much incident and the lack of scope among the characters; but the final hundred pages significantly altered my opinion, as the characters reveal more and more about themselves, as the mental strain of their medical work or of being locked up in the quarantined city give them more depth, and as we begin to witness actual deaths among those close to Dr Rieux.

The turning point (for me, anyway) is the pain-filled death of the young son of the city magistrate, Monsieur Othon, Jacques. Jacques dies in agony, wailing with childish pain, witnessed by almost all the main characters. From that point onwards the debates about God and judgement and sinfulness and exile and abandonment and so on – which had seemed abstract and flimsy in the first half – acquired a real depth. Not only was the boy’s death terrifying in itself – towards the end he begins screaming and doesn’t let off till he expires – but the impact it has on the main characters is genuinely unsettling. Grown men are shaken into rethinking their whole lives, but Camus’s depiction of the child’s death makes this very believable.

Although it has its faults of style and long-windedness, the second half in particular of The Plague very powerfully brings to life a whole raft of issues which concerned mid-twentieth century minds, and convinces you that this is indeed a masterpiece.

The characters

The Plague is narrated by a man who calls himself the Narrator, who explains how he has assembled eye-witness accounts and various documents and is able to give third-person descriptions of events and people.

Dr. Rieux is the central character. Aged 35 i.e. around Camus’s age, it is he who first stumbles on a dying rat in the hall of his apartment block, comes across the earliest plague patients, phones around other doctors for their opinion, begins to lobby the authorities, helps put in place the quarantine and isolation wards and liaises with his older colleague, Dr Castel, about the latter’s home-made attempts to devise a serum. He is a prime mover of the medical strand of the narrative.

But Rieux is also the copper-bottomed humanist who, we can imagine, most closely resembles Camus’s own humanist position. It is Rieux who has several in-depth discussions with the novel’s priest about God and divine Justice; who discusses the meaning of exile (i.e. being stuck in the city separated from the woman he loves) with the journalist Rambert; who becomes good friends with big strong Tarrou, who represents the political strand of the book.

Rieux is, in other words, a sort of still point around which the other characters rotate, confiding their life stories, sharing their views, debating the ‘meaning’ of the plague, and of their ‘exile’, of ‘justice’, of ‘love’.

Father Paneloux is a Jesuit priest, the representative of Catholic Christianity in the novel. He gives two lengthy sermons in the city’s cathedral. The first, in the early stages of the plague, castigates the city’s population in traditional Christian terms, saying the plague is a scourge sent by God against sinners for turning their backs on Him. It introduces the metaphor of God’s flail or scourge swishing over the stricken city, an image which comes to haunt several of the other characters.

Then, at the turning point of the story, Paneloux is present at the bedside of little Jacques Othon during the latter’s painful death. He offers prayers etc but, of course, nothing works or remits the little boy’s agony.

There follow inevitable are dialogues between Paneloux and the atheist characters, the latter asking how a caring God could torture children. Paneloux roughs out his explanation in conversation with Rieux and then goes on to give a powerful exposition of it in his Second Sermon.

This Second Sermon is, in its way, even fiercer and more unrepentantly Christian than the first, but in a more personal way. For a start, Paneloux stops saying ‘you’ to the congregation and starts saying ‘we’. He is down among them, he is one of ‘us’.

Paneloux’s argument is that you either believe in God or you don’t. If you do, then you must not only accept but embrace the suffering of the world, because it must be part of his plan. It passes our human understanding, but you must want it and will it. If you say you believe in God but reject this or that aspect of his plan, you are rejecting Him. it is all or nothing.

There is a Nietzschean force to this Second Sermon which I admired and responded to for its totality, for its vehemence, as, presumably, we are intended to.

After the death of little Jacques, Paneloux becomes much more interesting and psychologically resonant as a character. He throws himself into the voluntary work being done among the sick. When he himself falls ill and is nursed by Rieux’s mother at their apartment, his decline has depth and meaning, and so when he dies it is genuinely moving.

Jean Tarrou is a big, strong good-natured guy. He keeps a diary which the narrator incorporates into the text and which gives us independent assessments of tertiary characters like Monsieur Othon, Dr Castel, Cottard and so on. On the practical level, it is Tarrou who comes up with the idea of organising teams of volunteers to fight the plague i.e. going round checking wards, identifying new patients, arranging their conveyance to the isolation wards.

On the level of character type, Tarrou early on lets slip that he fought in the Spanish Civil War on the losing, Republican, side. This explains why he was hanging out in the Spanish quarter when the plague began. He is the political character in the novel, the image of the ‘committed’ man who resonates through existentialist thinking. The man who validates his life by giving it to a cause.

After the little boy’s death, Tarrou’s character moves to an entirely new level, when he confides in Rieux the key incident from his childhood. Tarrou’s father was a kindly family man with an entertaining hobby of memorising railway timetables. Tarrou knew he was a lawyer but didn’t really understand what this meant until, aged 17, he accompanied his father to court one day and was horrified to see him transformed into a begowned harpy of Justice, shouting for the death penalty to be imposed on a feeble yellow-looking fellow – the defendant – cowering in the witness box.

The scales dropped from Tarrou’s eyes and he ran away from home. He joined a worldwide organisation devoted to overthrowing the injustice of bourgeois society, which stood up for the workers and the humiliated everywhere. But he found himself, in turn, acquiescing in the executions which the leaders claimed were necessary to overthrow the regime which carried out executions. Tarrou gives a particularly unpleasant description of an execution by firing squad which he attends in Hungary, in graphic brutal detail. The size of the hole shot in the executed man’s chest haunts his dreams.

Tarrou is telling Rieux all this as the pair of them sit on a terrace overlooking the sea. The mood, the background susurrations of the ocean, and the seriousness of what he’s saying all chime perfectly. Having rejected the orthodox, bourgeois legal world of his father, he has equally walked away from what is not named but is pretty obviously the Communist Party. Now all he wants to do is avoid murder, and prevent death. And then – using the characteristically religious register of this text – he tells Rieux that he wants to be a saint. A saint without God.

This conversation, and Tarrou’s agonised journey from bourgeois rebel, through communist activist and fighter in Spain, to would-be saint is – for me – the best part of the book. For the first time in reading any of Camus’s books I felt I was getting to grip with the issues of his day dramatised in an accessible way.

It is all the more heart-breaking then when, just as the plague is beginning to finally let up, the death rate drop and the city begin to hope again – that tough noble Tarrou himself contracts it and dies. Characteristically, he demands that Rieux tell him the truth about the deterioration in his condition right till the end.

Raymond Rambert is the third major character who rotates around Rieux. He is a journalist visiting Oran to write about conditions in the Arab Quarter, when the plague strikes. When the city is closed he finds himself trapped and spends most of the novel trying to escape, first legally by petitioning the authorities, then illegally by paying people smugglers. This latter strand is long and boring, involving being handed from one dodgy geezer to another and primed to be smuggled out of a gate by ‘friendly’ guards only for the attempt to be permanently delayed due to all kinds of hitches. It is the presumably deliberate opposite of Hollywood exciting. Somewhere the narrator describes the plague as grimly unromantic, as drab and mundane and boring, and that accurately describes this thread of Rambert’s frustrated escape attempts.

Apart from this rather dull thread on the level of the plot, Rambert as a type is the main focus for discussions of ‘love’. He wants to escape so desperately in order to get back to the wife he loves and left in Paris. His energy and devotion is contrasted with the apathy on the one hand, or the frenzied debauchery on the other, of the other trapped townsfolk.

Again, like all the characters, Rambert is transfigured by Jacques’ death. It follows the latest disappointment in his many escape plans and after it, Rambert confides to Rieux, he has stopped trying to escape. After nearly a year in plague-struck Oran, he’s realised that the plague is now his plague; he has more in common with the stricken townsfolk than with outsiders. He will stay until the work here is done.

These are the three major characters (beside Rieux) and you can see how they are simultaneously real people and also function as narrative types who trigger periodic discussions of the issues of Camus’s time, or of larger issues of justice and love.

Minor characters

Joseph Grand is a fifty-something somewhat withered city clerk and a kind of comic version of the would-be author. In numerous scenes we witness him reading aloud to Rieux and sometimes some of the other serious characters, the opening of his Great Novel which, in fact, has never got beyond the opening sentence which he tinkers with endlessly. This is pretty broad satire on the self-involved irrelevance of many litterateurs. On the other hand, once the plague kicks off, he uses his skills to compile the tables and statistics which the city authorities need and finds himself praised by the narrator as precisely the kind of quiet, obscure but dogged commitment to work and efficiency which the narrator considers the true nature of bravery, of heroism.

Cottard lives in the same building as Grand and we meet both of them when Grand calls Rieux to tell him he’s found Cottard just as he was hanging himself. They save and restore him. From that point on Cottard is shifty and evades police and the authorities since attempted suicide is a crime. Once the plague kicks in he becomes much more peaceable, maybe because everyone else is now living in the state of nervous tension which he permanently inhabits. He becomes a black marketeer and pops up throughout the story. When the plague winds down he goes a bit mad and suddenly starts shooting out his window at random passers-by, a scene Rieux and Tarrou stumble across on one of their walks. He is not massacred as he would be in a Hollywood movie, but successfully arrested and taken off by the police.

Dr. Castel is a much older medical colleague of Rieux’s. He realises it is bubonic plague quicker than anyone else and then devotes his time to creating a plague serum, using the inadequate facilities to hand. His efforts tire him out and, although his serum is finally introduced, it’s not clear whether it has any impact on the plague which ultimately declines because it has just worn itself out.

Monsieur Othon the city’s pompous well-dressed magistrate, is often to be seen parading his well-dressed wife and harshly-disciplined children round town. Until his son Jacques dies – at which point he becomes greatly softened. As the relative of a victim he is sent to one of the isolation camps for a quarantine period, but surprises everyone when, upon leaving, he decides he wants to go back and help.

Comments on the characters

Summarising them like this makes it clearer than when actually reading it, how schematic the characters are, how they represent particular views or roles which combine to give a kind of overview of how society reacts to calamity. Having just read three of Camus’s plays (Caligula, Cross Purpose and The Just) I now have a strong sense that this is how Camus conceives of characters, as ideological or issue-driven types.

1. Note how none of them are women. It is the 1940s and still very much a man’s world. Experience only counts if it is male. In any actual plague there would be thousands of mothers concerned and caring for their children and probably many women would volunteer as nurses. The only women named are the remote ‘love objects’ which motivate the men – Rieux’s wife, who is packed off to a sanatorium at the start of the novel for a non-plague-related illness, and Rambert’s wife. In the main body of the narrative no women appear or speak, apart from Rieux’s ageing mother who comes and stays with him. The mother is a holy figure in Camus’s fiction (compare and contrast the centrality of the (dead) mother in L’Etranger.)

2. You will also note that there isn’t a single Arab or Algerian among these characters. Seven years after The Plague was published the Algerian War of Independence broke out and Algerians began fighting for the freedom to write their own narratives of their own country in their own language.

In this respect, in the perspective of history, The Plague is a kind of European fantasy, is set in a European fantasy of a country which soon afterwards ceased to exist.

The medicine and science

There is some medical detail about the plague, some description of the hard buboes which swell at the body’s lymph nodes, how they can be incised to release the pus, some descriptions of the fever, pain, the last-minute falling off of symptoms before the sudden death. Enough to give the narrative some veracity, but no more.

But Camus is more interested in personifying and psychologising the plague than in describing it scientifically.

Thus over a relatively brief period the disease lost practically all the gains piled up over many months. Its setbacks with seemingly predestined victims, like Grand and Rieux’s girl patient, its bursts of activity for two or three days in some districts synchronizing with its total disappearance from others, its new practice of multiplying its victims on, say, a Monday, and on Wednesday letting almost all escape, in short, its accesses of violence followed by spells of complete inactivity, all these gave an impression that its energy was flagging, out of exhaustion and exasperation, and it was losing, with its self-command, the ruthless, almost mathematical efficiency that had been its trump card hitherto.

Rieux was confronted by an aspect of the plague that baffled him. Yet again it was doing all it could to confound the tactics used against it; it launched attacks in unexpected places and retreated from those where it seemed definitely lodged. Once more it was out to darken counsel. (p.232)

In the first hundred pages or so I was hoping for more science, more medical descriptions, and was disappointed. Maybe Camus’s novel reflects the medical science of his day. Or maybe he only did as much research as was necessary to create the scaffold for his philosophical lucubrations.

Either way the book’s science and medical content is underwhelming. Early on Dr Rieux advises a plague victim to be put on a light diet and given plenty to drink. Is that it? Paris sends serum but it doesn’t seem to work very well and there’s never enough. Rieux tries in some cases to cut open the knotted lymph glands and let them bleed out blood and pus – but besides being messy and crude, this doesn’t seem to work either. The only real strategy the authorities have is to cart the infected off to isolation wards where they wait to die before their corpses are taken to massive plague pits and thrown into lime.

In this respect, the science and medical side of the narrative is closer to the medicine of Charles Dickens than to our computer-based, genome-cracking, antibiotic-designing era. It seemed pathetic and antique how the novel describes the isolated old Dr Castel plodding along trying to develop a serum locally, by himself, working with the inadequate means he has,

since the local bacillus differed slightly from the normal plague bacillus as defined in textbooks of tropical diseases. (p.112)

and that the narrator considers this feeble old man’s home-made efforts as truly ‘heroic’.

If it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a ‘hero’, the narrator commends to his readers, with, to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal. This will render to the truth its due, to the addition of two and two its sum of four, and to heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness.

(Incidentally, this is a good example of the obscurity typical of so much of Camus’s prose — ‘This will render to heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness.’ As usual I find myself having to read Camus sentences at least twice to decipher the meaning, and then wondering whether I have in fact learned anything. Does heroism have a secondary place just after, but never before, the noble claim of happiness? It sounds so precise, so logical, so confident. But it’s meaningless and instantly forgotten.)

Camus’s worldview

As Jean-Paul Sartre usefully, and a little cruelly, pointed out back at the time, Camus is not a philosopher – although he studied philosophy at university, it wasn’t to the same level as Sartre who went on to become a philosophy professor. Sartre also denied that Camus was even an ‘existentialist’ – by which maybe he simply meant that Camus wasn’t one of Sartre’s tribe – and Camus himself is ambivalent about using the term.

Instead, Camus is a kind of philosophical impressionist. Without much conceptual or logical rigour he is interested in depicting the psychological impact, the feel, the climate, produced by a handful of interlocking ‘ideas’.

Chief among these is the Absurd, the result of the mismatch between the human wish for order and meaning and the obvious indifference of a godless universe. ‘Exile’ is the name he gives to that sense humans have of being removed from their true domain, the place of consolation, meaning and belonging. He uses the word ‘hope’ to denote the delusions humans create to hide from themselves their complete abandonment in a godless universe.

Thus the brave and heroic Absurd Man faces down a ‘godless universe’ and lives without hope i.e. without resorting to fond illusions.

And finally, Revolt – the Absurd Man revolts against his condition. The notion of revolt arose from his discussion of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus (do not kill yourself; face the absurdity; overcome it; revolt against your fate) and was to be developed at length in his other ‘philosophical’ work, The Rebel.

Why is this relevant to The Plague? Because the advent of a plague, spreading unstoppably and leading to the closing of the city, throws up a wide variety of dramatic situations in which his cast of seven or eight main characters can act out and think through and express various aspects of Camus’s worldview.

Very little happens in the ‘plot’. The medical aspect is medieval. We read the book to find in it a steady stream of dramatisations of Camus’s worldview. His other two novels – The Outsider and The Fall are much shorter at around 100 pages each. The Plague is the longest fictional depiction of Camus’s theory of the Absurd. Reading it at such length led me to isolate three distinct themes:

The centrality of Roman Catholic Christianity to Camus’s worldview

The revelation that the Law – with its ideas of justice, judgement, crime and punishment – is arguably more important that the ideas around the Absurd

The horrible long-winded style which makes stretches of it almost impossible to read (and which I deal with in a separate blog post).

1. The role of Christianity in Camus’s philosophy

It was talking Camus over with my 18 year-old son (who has just completed an A-Level in Philosophy) which made me realise the centrality of French Roman Catholicism to both Camus and Sartre.

Both Frenchmen go on and on and on about the ‘anguish’ and the ‘absurdity’ of living in what they never cease to tell us is a ‘godless universe’.

But it is only so distressing to wake up to this godlessness if you ever thought it was godful. I was brought up by atheist parents in the mostly atheist country of England where the Church of England is run by nice vicars. The Anglican worldview is one of moderation and common sense and tea and biscuits. There haven’t really been many great Anglican thinkers because thinking hasn’t been its main activity. Running missions in Africa or the East End or organising village fetes in the Cotswolds have traditionally been Anglican activities. The Anglican church has been a central topic of gentle English humour, from Trollope to The Vicar of Dibley.

French Roman Catholic culture couldn’t be more different. It is both politically and philosophically deep and demanding and, historically, has played a vindictively reactionary role in French politics. The Catholic worldview is far more intense, making the world a battlefield between the forces of God and the Devil, with a weekly confession in which you must confront your own innermost failings. Its educational élite are the mercilessly intelligent Jesuits. Its tradition includes Pascal with his terrifying vision of a vast universe, indifferent to us unless filled by the love of God. Politically, the Catholic Church led the attack on the Jewish army officer Dreyfus in the prolonged cultural civil war over his false accusation for treason – the Dreyfus Affair (dramatised by Robert Harris in his novel An Officer and a Spy) – which divided France from 1894 to 1906.

Since the French Revolution, very broadly French culture has been divided into conservatives who line up behind the reactionary Catholic Church, and liberals and socialists, who oppose it.

Think how repressive, how reactionary, how dominating their boyhood Catholic educations must have been in the 1910s and 1920s for young Jean-Paul and Albert. Think how much of a mental and psychological effort it must have been for them to struggle free of their Catholic education. It meant rejecting the beliefs which their parents, their wider family and the entire society around them cherished. It meant standing alone. It meant being an outsider.

Thus my suggestion is that the extremely negative value which Sartre and Camus attribute to the idea of realising that there is no God and that you are free to make your own set of values and decisions derives from their powerful emotional feeling that this involves a loss, the loss of their once life-supporting Catholic faith.

A lot of the emotional intensity of their ideas and fictions derive from the intensity of the struggle to break free from the Catholic Church. Sartre calls this state of lucid acknowledgement of your freedom in the world ‘anguish’. They both describe the state as a state of abandonment. Camus in particular again and again uses the analogy of it being a state of exile.

All of this terminology is powerfully negative. It suggests that there once was something – and now it is lost. In Sartre and Camus’s works they refer to the lost thing as the ‘illusions’ or ‘habits’ of bourgeois life, but my suggestion is that Sartre and Camus don’t themselves realise how fundamental their lost Christian faith is to their entire worldview.

Godless. Over and over again they refer to the horror and terror of living in a ‘godless’ universe. Well, if you weren’t brought up to expect a godful universe you won’t be particularly surprised or disappointed, let alone thrown into mortal anguish when someone tells you that it is godless.

It was my son who pointed out to me with calm rationality that there is no logical need to be upset or anguished or exiled by living in a ‘godless universe’. You can quite logically accept that there is a ridiculous mismatch between our wish for meaning and comfort and security in the world and the absurdity of people being run over by cars or blown up by terrorists – without giving it an emotional value – without making it the source of catastrophic emotional collapse. Just as you can acknowledge the reality of gravity or the speed of light or that humans are mammals without bursting into tears. It is just one more fact among thousands of facts about the world we live, pleasant or less pleasant, which most people process, accept and forget in order to get on with their lives.

Camus, like Sartre, thinks of these ‘ordinary’ people – people who, alas, aren’t writers or philosophers – as sheep, cattle, as ‘cowards’ or ‘scum’ (which is what Sartre – rather surprisingly – calls them in Existentialism is a Humanism) because they are hiding from or rejecting or denying the Truth. I think, on the contrary, that most people are perfectly capable of grasping the truth about the world they live in, they just don’t make the same song and dance about it as two French lapsed Catholics.

All this is prompted by slowly realising that the supposedly existential or atheist worldview depicted in The Plague is completely reliant on the ideology and terminology of Christianity. Thus it is no surprise that the Jesuit Father Paneloux is one of the central characters, nor that the book contains two chapters devoted to sermons delivered by him, nor that one of the central moments in the book is the confrontation between the humanist Dr Rieux and the Jesuit Paneloux following the death of little Jacques. When the priest insists that God’s Plan ‘passes our human understanding’, the doctor replies:

‘No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.’ (p.178)

God also features in several of the conversations between Dr Rieux and the thoughtful Tarrou:

‘Do you believe in God, doctor?…’ His face still in shadow, Rieux said that he’d already answered: that if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God…
‘After all,’ the doctor repeated, then hesitated again, fixing his eyes on Tarrou, ‘it’s something that a man of your sort can understand most likely, but, since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence.’
Tarrou nodded.
‘Yes. But your victories will never be lasting; that’s all.’
Rieux’s face darkened.
‘Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.’
‘No reason, I agree. Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.’
‘Yes. A never ending defeat.’ (p.108)

This is Camus’s attitude. Revolt against fate. Rebel against the godless universe. Resist. Fight, even if it’s without hope.

But – and this is my point – note how the secular, Absurdist, existentialist, call it what you will, attitude can only emerge by piggybacking, as it were, on the back of Christian theology. This plucky godlessness only really has meaning be reference to the lucky godfulness which precedes it. They can’t discuss the meaning of life cold, from a standing start – there always has to be a preliminary clearing of throats, some foreplay, involving God this or God that, do you believe in God, No, do you believe in God etc — it’s a kind of warming up and stretching exercise before they can get round to saying what they do believe in – justice, freedom, human dignity or what have you.

The entire discourse of the Absurd absolutely requires there to be a Christianity to reject and replace, before it can express itself.

2. The importance of the law, judgement and punishment

Reading his other two novels has slowly made me realise that pretty old-fashioned ideas of crime and punishment are central to Camus. The Outsider (1942) is about a man who commits a crime (murdering an Arab) and is punished for it. The entire ‘drama’ of the story is in the mismatch between his inner psychological state of almost psychotic detachment from his own life and actions – but where this absurd mismatch is brought to life, where his detachment from social norms is misinterpreted and distorted to make him appear a monstrous psychopath, is in a court of law.

The Outsider becomes a study of the process of the law and a questioning of the idea of human ‘justice’. The entire second part of the book mostly consists of the protagonist’s questioning by magistrates, then the long courtroom scenes featuring the prosecution and defence lawyers doing their thing, followed by the judge’s summing up. It is a courtroom drama.

The Fall (1956) is even more Law-drenched, since it consists of an uninterrupted monologue told by a lawyer about his own ‘fall from grace’. It is a text infested with the imagery of crime and sin, punishment and redemption, judgement and forgiveness. There are some passages about the Absurd but really it is ideas about crime and punishment which dominate.

But also, look at the title. The Fall. A reference to the central event in all Christian theology, the fall of Man. Notions of the law are inextricable interlinked with Christian theology and imagery.

Religion and Law in The Plague

So I was not surprised when I began to discern in The Plague at least as much discourse about religion (about sin and punishment) and about the Law (about justice and judgement) as I did about the ideas Camus is famous for i.e. the Absurd and so on.

In particular, it comes as no surprise when Tarrou, one of the most intelligent characters, reveals that the key to his character, to his entire career as a political activist, was revulsion at the vengefulness of his father’s bourgeois form of justice, and a resultant search for some kind of better, universal, political justice. And I have already noted the centrality of Father Paneloux and the debates about God which he triggers wherever he goes.

Many commentators then and now have thought that The Plague is a clever allegory about the occupation of France by the Nazis, and the stealthy way a sense of futility and despair crept over the French population, numbing some, spurring others into ‘revolt’ and resistance.

Every time I read about this interpretation I wondered why Camus, who apparently was ‘active’ in the Resistance, didn’t at some stage write a novel of what it was actually like to live under German occupation and be a member of the Resistance. That would be of huge historic importance and also directly tie his ideas to their historical context, making them more powerful and meaningful. Maybe it’s petty-minded of me – but it is striking how none of Camus’ three novels mention the war, the defeat of France, the German occupation, Nazi ideology, France’s contribution to the Holocaust, any aspect of the work of the Resistance, or how he and his compatriots experienced the Liberation.

On one level, it feels like a vast hole at the centre of his work and a huge opportunity lost.

Anyway, this historical context is completely absent from The Plague. What there is instead are these dominating issues of law and justice, sin and forgiveness, and the all-pervading language of Law and Religion.

Over The Plague hang the shades of Dostoyevsky’s characters interminably discussing whether or not there is a God and how his love and/or justice are shown in the world – and also of Kafka’s novels with their obsessive repetition of the idea of a man arrested or turned into an insect for no reason, no reason at all, with their predominating idea of the injustice of the world.

(Camus includes a jokey reference to Kafka on page 51 where the dodgy character Cottard says he’s reading a ‘detective story’ about a man who was arrested one fine day without having done anything, a transparent reference to The Trial.)

Statistical evidence

Because the entire translated text is available online, you can do a word search, with the following results which tend to support my argument – that the novel is far more about ideas derived from Christian religion or the Law and jurisprudence, than the ideas of Camus’s brand of existentialism.

absurd – 7 times, and never in a philosophical sense

revolt – 6 – ‘Weariness is a kind of madness. And there are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.’ (p.178)

abandoned – 4

futile – 4

suicide – 3

godless – 0

So there is surprisingly little direct reference to the main concepts which made him famous. Now compare and contrast with the frequency of religious terms. These are far more common, far more expressed and discussed.

God – 46 instances

saint – 15

religion – 12

heaven – 8

hell – 7

salvation – 6

purgatory – 2

And finally, legal terminology:

law – 14

justice – 10 – ‘When a man has had only four hours’ sleep, he isn’t sentimental. He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice, hideous, witless justice.’ (p.156)

judge – 6

crime – 6

punishment – 4

judgement – 2

Again, there is more reference to basic ideas of justice and injustice than to the concepts clustered around his Absurdism.

The one Camusian idea which is very present is that of ‘exile’, which is mentioned 27 times – ‘the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile’. This is, if you like, a kind of metaphorical embodiment of the central idea of Camus’s version of existentialism – the literal sense of loss, separation, exile from home and loved ones standing for the metaphorical sense of exile from belief systems which give our lives purpose. But it is typical of Camus that it isn’t a philosophical idea – it is a metaphor for a distressed state of mind, for the deprivation of the comforts of home which, deep down – as I suggest above – is in fact caused by the loss of religious faith.

Credit

La Peste by Albert Camus was published in France in 1947. This translation of The Plague by Stuart Gilbert was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1948, and as a Penguin paperback in 1960. All quotes & references are to the 1972 reprint of the Penguin paperback edition (which cost 35p).